Fabienne in Asia

a road to rival the back woods of fort nelson

bought a cheap bus ticket at a dodgy but friendly agency on khao san road, bangkok. erin, it’s pronounced exactly the way it’s written. there’s your little daily dose of humour, my dear. the bus took us to the thailand-cambodia border. the bus waiting for us on the other side wasn’t a bus at all, but a pick-up truck. we – the 20 of us from the air-conditioned thailand bus – asked when the bus would be arriving to take us from poipet to siem reap, and batman (í’m sure it isn’t written as phonetically as it sounds),our dear friend/siem reap guesthouse rep who was sent to whisk us all off to his lovely lodgings, just laughed and pointed to the truck.

we drove through the night, ten hours (200km) down the most pot-holed road i’ve ever encountered, from poipet, the last khmer rouge stronghold, to siem reap. 20 foreigners in the back, a khmer guy on the roof, another on the bumper, and a third driving. it was unbelievable. the swede who sat beside me had never seen stars without light pollution hazing the view. i’d never seen miles and miles of moonlit rice fields, or random clusters of teenagers midnight-dancing to khmer pop tunes on the roadside. aside from the occasional oncoming motorbike or pickup, the only light came from bobbing flashlights in rice fields, held by farmers hunting cockroaches for breakfast.

our truck broke down, a few bridges were nearly stripped of their planks, one bridge was so bare that it required the skill of a drunken ryan boyle on a quad to cross it, the words ‘highway robbery’ played across my mind a few times. it all amounted to the kind of thrill i’d been craving for months. i may have been the only one in that pick-up who was totally delighted that the air-conditioned bus never arrived. same same, i guess, but so wonderfully different.

Tags: Cambodia, Travel

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